What Will It Cost to Cover China?

The Chinese Communist Party generated hopeful headlines this month by acknowledging that it faces a time of reckoning: to prevent economic peril and rising unrest, the Party promised to overhaul the economy, to allow more parents to have two children instead of only one, and to end the arbitrary “reëducation through labor” system, among other changes. This is an attempt at political inoculation—the Party is betting that giving its people a heavier dose of autonomy will raise their immunity against the full infection of democracy. In case there was any confusion about the goal, the Party reiterated its determination to fortify its control of the country and to ward off the influx of values and information that it finds threatening.

Journalism on China is facing a time of reckoning as well. The foreign correspondent Paul Mooney, an American who has covered China for the past eighteen years, for Newsweek, the South China Morning Post, and others, has been denied a visa. To anyone familiar with his work, the reason is no mystery—it’s outrageous, but familiar. He has been one of the most diligent and capable investigators of abuses of power. Mooney joins a list of other foreign correspondents—including Andrew Higgins and Melissa Chan—who have been denied entry, or have been forced to leave, in the past two years, because the Chinese government objects to how they do their work.

But the most lasting story about press freedom this week may turn out to be one not yet published. Unnamed journalists at Bloomberg News have accused their employer of withholding investigative pieces for fear of offending Chinese authorities. For a year, reporters who previously produced award-winning reports from China had been probing ties between a businessman and top leaders in Beijing. Then Matthew Winkler, the Bloomberg editor-in-chief, reportedly told his staff that the Party would consider such a story off-limits; in interviews, Bloomberg journalists said that he compared the situation to Nazi-era Germany, where news organizations had censored themselves to maintain access to the country. Winkler disputed the accusations, saying that the investigations remain “active and not spiked.” At the same time, Bloomberg has suspended one of its China specialists, Michael Forsythe, the author of the unpublished investigation. (On Tuesday, Forsythe confirmed that he has left the company.) And Amanda Bennett, the former executive editor for projects and investigations, whose unit produced many major China pieces, left Bloomberg on Wednesday, saying that she was “most proud of the groundbreaking” work they had published on the family wealth of Chinese leaders.

For thirty years, China’s economy has been growing and transforming, and the foreign press corps has grown and transformed with it. In the late seventies, after the Cultural Revolution, when the first American correspondents were permitted to settle in the country, China was so exotic that practically everything was news. As recently as a decade ago, the government officially barred journalists from leaving the capital without permission (though they did it, anyway), so reporters often had to rely on furtive dashes to the countryside and scattered glimpses of élite political intrigue. They did not have to worry about censorship, per se; unlike Chinese journalists, who could lose their jobs or go to jail if they violated a taboo, foreign correspondents sent their stories over the transom to their publications abroad. Sometimes Chinese Embassies noticed a critical piece and pushed it back to the Foreign Ministry, which would summon a reporter and issue a warning against further “misunderstandings.” But real consequences were rare.

Today, the story is at once more accessible and more dangerous. To cover China is to chronicle the world’s second-largest economy, a rising superpower, and one-fifth of the world’s population. China is so central to our economic lives that journalists have had no choice but to engage China with greater technical analysis and precision.

Beginning in 2012, Bloomberg, the Times, and others elevated their reporting on Chinese politics by rooting through documents in order to unravel the hidden beneficiaries of China’s new wealth. The rewards were clear: they have ushered in a golden age of foreign correspondence in China, and they have received nearly every honor that the industry offers.

There have been clear costs, too: the Chinese government blocked the Times’ Web site to limit the spread of its stories and to threaten the advertising revenue generated by the Chinese-language service launched in June, 2012. In the case of Bloomberg News, it blocked the Web site and ordered Chinese financial institutions not to buy Bloomberg’s terminals. And, crucially, it has stopped issuing visas to new journalists applying from those institutions.

Taken together, this is the Chinese government’s broadest effort in decades to roll back unwelcome foreign coverage—and that raises the stakes for news organizations that are struggling to figure out how to handle China. Make no mistake, this is not a simple choice. At a time when news organizations find their business models under assault, the prospect of taking an expensive stand against a foreign state is unappealing, especially when it might mean giving up their dreams for future growth in China.

But this is a new incarnation of an old and weighty responsibility. As foreign correspondents, we have always borne the task of recording the events that journalists in their native countries are not permitted, by circumstance or by force, to record themselves. In the past, that has often meant documenting war and dissent. But in China today it also means documenting the world’s most rapid accumulation of assets, the unwritten rules, the sorting of winners and losers. It is a story about power, and it will have global consequences for years to come.

Bloomberg’s hard-won reputation for groundbreaking work in China took years to establish. In the days ahead, reporters and subscribers will be watching to see how the company handles this reckoning: Will it run the stories that it says are active? Will it discuss its practice of coding sensitive articles to prevent them from appearing on Bloomberg terminals in China? Are there other countries where it exercises that kind of limited distribution?

The story is about more than Bloomberg; it’s about documenting the emerging contest over the values that China will project as a great power. The leaders who met in Beijing this month were deciding not simply what reforms to undertake but what of kind of country they want to leave for future generations. It is a story that nobody can afford to ignore.